Burnout Paradise (Xbox360)

Is there any developer buzz term more meaningless these days than "open-world gameplay"? Let's face it, it's kind of been done to death at this point, so you have to look on with a bit of skepticism when a developer touts the concept as the next big thing for its franchise. It's understandable, then, if Burnout Paradise's concept freaks you out a little bit. Burnout has, by tradition, been a fairly structured arcade racing game up to this point, and one would have to wonder exactly how well an open environment would serve the series' crash-happy gameplay methodology. Evidently, the answer is quite well. Developer Criterion has invented a world wonderfully suited to Burnout's nature, a city built exclusively to cater to your destructive whims. And while a few design hitches here and there get in the way now and again, by and large Burnout Paradise delivers an experience that is both true to the Burnout name and wonderfully fresh-feeling all at once.

The star of the show is Paradise City itself. Coming complete with the titular Guns 'N Roses song (because Burnout: Night Train or Burnout: Mr. Brownstone probably wouldn't have been as catchy), Paradise City is, at first blush, a pretty standard racing game city, complete with all the usual landmark locations and boring background traffic. But it quickly becomes evident that Paradise City is meant for a greater purpose than just being a simple city to race around in. In effect, the city is a blank slate, a pristine canvas on which to paint your own obliterative masterpiece. The simple act of driving aimlessly around the city constantly presents new roads, shortcuts, and destructible objects for you to experience and, often, destroy. Nearly every intersection of road hosts a new event of some kind, and even after you've worked your way through the game's progression of driver's licenses (the only specifically linear portion of the game design), you'll still be finding new things you didn't even know were there.

That might sound a little overwhelming, especially if you've grown accustomed to the rather specific brand of racing that Burnout has always subscribed to. And at first, it most definitely is. Though the in-game tutorials do a decent job of explaining the event types and basic mechanics, you're initially left to your own devices and only have the small minimap to guide you through the many twists and turns of the city as you race--unless of course you want to hit the pause button regularly and use the larger map, which is a bit annoying to do. Those well accustomed to Burnout's previously track-based racing model might find having to explore to find the best route to the finish a bit frightening, but the good news is that it doesn't take a great deal of time to get a feel for the city's various ins and outs.

Until that time, you will experience some trial and error (with a heavier focus on the error), but the funny thing about that is that while you may initially find yourself failing races, it's not often you have to just go back and keep doing that same race again and again. The focus of Burnout Paradise isn't on doing specific events so much as it is about doing whatever you feel like. If you fail a race, odds are that there are roughly a dozen starting points for other races near the finish line of that previous race, and unless you've done them all, you can just hit up any one of them to get another notch on your license. Toward the very end of the game, when you've bested the bulk of the game's events, you may find yourself lamenting the lack of a quick return feature to get back to a race's starting point. But for the majority of the game, it's not really an issue.

It's a strange design to get used to initially, but once you do, it becomes incredibly rewarding. You can spend hours at a time just dawdling around the city and still make forward progress within the game. Don't feel like racing? Just go break through shortcut gates or bust up billboards, which are tallied up as you break each one. Or, track down one of the cars you unlocked on the road and take it down to add it to your collection. Or, you can opt to pick a road and attempt to "own" it. There are two types of events associated with each of the major roads in the game. Time trials are as you'd expect--you simply start at one end of the road and start driving down it, attempting to get the fastest time you can. Secondly, there are showtime events, which are the game's effective replacement for the crash mode found in previous installments of the series. Whereas crash mode was sort of like a puzzle mode in the way it made you create elaborate car crashes out of painstakingly built traffic designs, showtime is the polar opposite. These are elaborate car crashes born from little more than a bunch of nearby cars and your ability to control what is, in essence, a sentient car wreck.

In a word, showtime mode is absurd. The goal is similar to crash mode in that you're aiming to create as much damage as humanly possible, with various types of cars offering up different cash bonuses that feed into your final score. All the while, you can move your busted husk of a car around by pressing the boost button, which causes you to bounce around like a rubber ball. Again, totally absurd, but also totally awesome. It might lack the puzzling nature of the crash mode, but for pure visceral thrill and laughs-a-minute wrecking, showtime mode delivers in spades. It would have been nice if Criterion had found a way to have both the crash mode and showtime mode coexisting, as neither would make a particularly good replacement for the other; but on its own, showtime is a great deal of fun.

A number of other elements from previous Burnouts are also missing or altered here. The lack of aftertouch (the mechanic that let you steer your wreck into opponents during races and take them out) is a real bummer, as it makes wrecking during races a pure nuisance rather than an opportunity for more destructive glee. Traffic checking is absent as well, though it isn't sorely missed. The racing artificial intelligence has seen a bit of tweaking here and there. You still get the sense of rubber banding that the series has always employed, but as the game goes on and the racers get tougher, your opponents become more aggressive and don't just tank right before the finish line. By and large, the game is actually a bit easier than the last couple of Burnout games, but the challenge toward the later stages of the game definitely ramps up significantly.

The racing itself is as exciting as it's ever been. Standard races are intense and thrilling, road rage events are full of wreckful delights, stunt runs have you jumping, barrel rolling, and flat spinning all over the place, marked man races are tense fights to the finish line as multiple enemy cars bop you around trying to wreck you beyond repair, and burning routes have you taking on challenging time trials to earn new cars. If there's any flaw to be noted with the core game design, it's maybe that there aren't enough event types. There's no shortage of events and random stuff to do, but running the same event types, and even some of the same specific events again and again, can grow a bit tiresome after a while. After each license upgrade, all the events you've raced (except for burning routes) reset, so you end up doing a lot of them over and over again. This wouldn't even be an issue if there were a greater variety of event types, but as it stands, there are only those few, and you may wear out on doing races and marked man events again and again.

If you do get a bit bored with the single-player action, you can always hop online and race against others. Doing so is quite seamless. Simply press right on the D pad to bring up the online menu, and then decide if you want to join up with other existing games or create your own. Online in Burnout Paradise is quite a different animal than that of previous Burnout games. You don't just hop into a lobby menu and pick races to engage in. Instead, the city itself is the lobby, and while the host decides what he wants to unleash upon you, you can just mess around and do whatever you like.

When hosting, you have the ability to both race and take on challenges. Races are of your own design, with you setting the beginning and ending points anywhere in the city. Challenges are set, and there are literally hundreds of them. The trick is that there are a limited number of challenges depending on how many players are in a group. There are 50 challenges for two players, 50 for eight players, and 50 for each denomination in between. This means that once you've exhausted all the challenges for two players, you'll have to get three, then four, and so on and so on if you want to complete them all. That might prove unwieldy for those who don't have a lot of friends online to play the game, but at least the challenges themselves are creative and fun. The challenges range from competitive bouts of drifting, crashing, and jumping to cooperative versions of all the same stuff. It's an inventive mode to be sure and an exceptionally fun one when you've got a good crew of friends to play with.

It also bears mention that while online, you can use the PlayStation Eye or Xbox Live Vision Camera to take shots of your rivals online. When you take down a rival player that has a camera hooked up, the cam will take a mugshot of that player's reaction. It's kind of a neat feature that, unfortunately, will probably be abused by all manner of nudity over the course of the game's lifespan, but that's inevitably what happens when you let people do things with cameras.

Paradise's visual presentation is precisely the kind of top-notch work you've come to expect from the series. Once again, the game sets a standard for how a sense of speed should feel in an arcade racer. This game is lightning fast, and the frame rate in both the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 versions of the game holds up regardless of the chaos onscreen. The car crashes in this game are absolutely fantastic, thanks to some dynamite particle effects and camera work in each and every mangled wreck. Cars deform to wonderful effect, scrunching up like an accordion in head-on collisions and bending and twisting nicely in other situations. The only thing that continues to look a little weird is the total lack of drivers in all the cars around the city. It's understandable that Criterion would leave out mangled corpses or what have you for the sake of an E 10+ rating, but it still looks strange seeing all these disembodied cars driving around like a society of Turbo Teens.

It's also worth noting that Burnout Paradise is a game that commands an HD display, and not just for full graphical effect. On the standard-definition TVs we tried, we found the minimap to be borderline useless unless we squinted like crazy. On an HD set, the minimap is detailed and blown up enough to rely on, but when playing in standard definition, it simply became a hassle to use.

If you're looking for differences between the two versions, you won't find many. The PlayStation 3 version looks maybe a hair crisper than the 360 version, but that's about the only visual difference to speak of. On the flipside, the 360 version has a slight edge in that you can use custom soundtracks to drown out the miserable collection of songs EA has amassed for the game. There are a few highlights that fit well with the theme of high-energy racing, but the vast bulk of the music consists of irritating modern rock that's about as ill-fitting as humanly possible. Avril Lavigne's "Girlfriend" might, itself, be a car wreck of a song, but it doesn't fit the vibe of the game at all. Add in the collection of original Criterion-produced guitar rock tracks from previous Burnout games that sound like they were culled from Joe Satriani's nightmares, and you have a pretty unpleasant musical experience all around. The annoying radio DJ who pops up now and again to give hints, mock you obnoxiously when you fail, and make one glib comment or another about something going on in the city doesn't help matters. He's merely an annoyance that probably wouldn't even be worth mentioning save for the fact that you cannot turn him off. At least the sound effects are still top-flight in every regard. Crashes thunder, engines roar, and tires screech with terrific clarity all throughout the game. If you've got a surround-speaker setup, it's all the better.

It's entirely possible that some people might not enjoy Burnout Paradise's significant shift in direction, specifically those who simply wanted another incremental Burnout sequel. Indeed, Paradise is anything but incremental, and while it might prove a polarizing experience for some, most will likely appreciate what a radical overhaul this game really is. The open-world design isn't just a lazy gimmick--it's a wonderfully executed concept that doesn't rob the game of the series' most beloved tenet: the act of driving fast and wrecking hard. If you're one of the people who tried the Burnout Paradise demo and formed a rather negative opinion of the game, you're not alone. But if you have any affection for the series, you really owe it to yourself to give the full game a look. The demo did little to truly represent what a superbly fun racer this game can be.

Kingdom Under Fire: Circle of Doom (Xbox360)

The Kingdom Under Fire series experienced a renaissance with the release of the excellent Crusaders on the Xbox in 2004, and Circle of Doom takes even more chances with the franchise. Unlike its predecessors, though, the game eschews strategy elements in favor of a pure action role-playing experience, albeit with uneven results. The action devolves into tedium, the story has no obvious bearing on the gameplay proper, and a number of unnecessary hindrances break up the rhythm of the gameplay. If you take things online with friends, the pace picks up, but not enough to overlook some noticeable and annoying drawbacks.

Like much of Circle of Doom, the story guns for sophistication but ends up being relatively inconsequential, simply because there's no strong narrative thread to tie the action together. You'll start the game controlling one of five characters that fall into the usual hack-and-slash archetypes (a sixth can also be unlocked), and each experiences a slightly different story, though the manner of storytelling is the same for all of them. Within dungeons, you will find idols (which also function as vendors and, occasionally, quest givers) that provide a safe place for sleeping and dreaming. Once asleep, you enter a dreamworld where you can talk with characters that provide quests and serve up bits of cryptic dialogue that may lead fans of previous Kingdom Under Fire games to nod their heads with understanding, but will confuse most anyone else. There are no cutscenes within the gameplay proper, and none of the action seemingly relates to the tale that so slowly and quixotically unfolds in the reveries of sleep. The resulting disconnection between the game and its fragmented parables keeps you from getting engaged, because you're never quite sure why, exactly, you need to be fighting legions of skeletons and lava monsters.

Luckily, you'll hack and slash your way through crowds of far more enticing enemies than those action-RPG standards. Circle of Doom has no shortage of monsters, often tossing many dozens of them at you at a given time. Many of the enemy designs are remarkably imaginative. Grunting, crawling zombies called flesh men swarm around you; invisible lizardmen will attack you without warning; and giant statues and their sculptors clog passageways, waiting for your sword and bow to wreak havoc. When the game is running on all cylinders, slicing your way through the hordes is as compelling as you would expect from the genre--not because the game is anything special, but because the formula on which it's based is a proven one.

In fact, the same formula that provides the majority of the game's entertaining moments is what ultimately drags Circle of Doom down--at times because the game is nothing but formula, and at others because the basic ingredients of the familiar recipe lack depth and refinement. Even with a good number of melee and ranged weaponry, the action gets incredibly repetitive, particularly because to accomplish certain quests and get the most out of the magic system (more on this subject later), you'll revisit the same six dungeons over and over again. One quest that required us to collect pure gold called for multiple visits to the same area, while another forced us to randomly fight through dungeons until the quest giver felt enough time had elapsed. While some of the dungeon aspects generate randomly, the basic elements of the dungeons rarely change, and as creative as some of the monster designs are, it gets tiring to mash your button through the same ones ad nauseam. To make things even more monotonous, while dungeons are broken up into multiple levels separated by loading times, should you need to return to one, you have to fight your way through the entire dungeon, since the game won't let you travel directly to the level you need to visit.

The pacing problems brought about by the vague, disengaged story and constant repetition are further exacerbated by other issues that break up any forward momentum you'll begin to feel. While many enemies don't seem to be trying very hard to strike you, their attacks will frequently (if not usually) knock you back, stun you, or cause a confusion effect that inverts your control scheme until the effect has worn off. At times, particularly in the frustratingly confined dungeon called the Hall of Arrogance, these effects can string together into a horrible, infuriating cycle of inescapable damage, as stone statues knock you down or stun you while drillers spew fire at you and hovering spirits electrocute you. It also doesn't help that the environments, as interesting as some of them look, are constricted and highly linear, which is at odds with the huge number of fiendish foes that rush you. The aforementioned "damage loop" wouldn't be an issue if there were room to move about, but it's relatively easy to be cornered. Additionally, if you string together a number of combo attacks, your character will have to finish a long animation sequence that you can't escape from. The result of these and other prevalent issues give the action a halting and awkward feel that never hits the smooth, quick stride that exemplifies the best games of the genre.

The game's inexcusably jittery camera is also a guilty accomplice to these crimes, because it never seems to know how to arrange itself. Its usual position is a little awkward, since it feels too low to the ground and too close to your character, but it's workable provided there is enough room to move. Alas, the cramped levels confuse the camera, causing it to get stuck behind every object it can find, change angles at inopportune times, or even zoom in so close, all you can see is a jumble of geometry. The camera has been an issue in the prior strategy-action games in the series, so it's disheartening to see that the camera control here is actually a step backward.

You can also perform special attacks, though the method of earning them is certainly an interesting and unusual one. When you visit the dreamworld, you can take quests that open up new skills to you when completed. Learning a new skill or spell generally involves killing a certain number of particular monsters, at which point you can turn in the quest and add the spell to your repertoire. The system sounds nifty, but in actuality, it's highly problematic. Until you choose which spell you want to acquire, you aren't even sure what monsters you will need to defeat, so you can't choose missions that fit in with your current main quest progress. In some cases, it means returning to a dungeon you've already slogged through a number of times, while in others, you may need to visit an area you haven't been to yet. In the end, earning new spells can often be more trouble than it's worth, and many of them are so ineffective, it's not worth the extra 30 minutes of repeated dungeon-crawling it takes to earn them. Furthermore, you can take on only two skill quests at a time, which means you may go many hours without learning a single skill at all. It simply isn't worth it, unless you have returned to the game to play on a higher difficulty level. On the standard difficulty, however, you could reasonably play the entire game without ever needing a single special skill at all.

Outside of the action proper, there are some interesting ideas at play, but again, they sound cleverer on paper than they are in practice. When you level up, you can spend attribute points in one of three areas: hit points, skill points, and luck. Hit points are the only straightforward aspect of the three, and spending points in this area increases the size of your health bar. Skill points contribute to your stamina bar, which is possibly the game's most interesting feature. In Circle of Doom, just the act of swinging or firing your weapon diminishes your stamina bar, and each weapon diminishes it in various degrees. It's fairly quick to fill up, but a weapon that uses a lot of stamina will deplete the bar relatively quickly, which means you need to either wait for enough stamina to swing again, or use a white potion to completely replenish your meter. It's another aspect of the action that can often contribute to even more awkward pacing--but it's also relatively strategic, because you can't just rely on the speed and attack prowess of the weapon to determine how effective it will be in battle. A relatively weak weapon that doesn't deplete your stamina can actually be more effective than a stronger weapon that diminishes it quickly, because you can't swing it continuously and will need to frequently wait for your stamina to recharge.

Luck is the third attribute on which you can spend points, though it is the vaguest of the three. According to the game manual, spending points in luck increases the frequency and quality of item drops, and we can certainly attest to finding better loot after spending attribute points in that area. Luck also increases your chances of success at synthesis. You can enhance weapons, armor, and accessories by visiting an idol and using an item and/or special ability to increase their effectiveness. The result isn't always an improvement, and guaranteeing 100 percent success on the synthesis attempt can be tough on your in-game wallet, but it's a perfectly reasonable method of item enhancement that benefits from some trial and error.

Circle of Doom can be played offline, or you can join up to three other others cooperatively; and like many similar games, the gameplay benefits from the addition of others. This is most apparent with some of the wearisome, often torturous boss characters, which aren't all that challenging but are certainly time consuming if you're on your own. Because some of them are obviously tailored toward certain characters over others (the first boss, which requires a ranged weapon, is an obvious example), a well-rounded party of four can increase the entertainment value significantly. Sadly, co-op play isn't available offline, so you'll need to play online via Xbox Live to use this feature. We didn't any experience any major lag or other glitches, so you should expect online play to be a relatively problem-free experience.

There is some occasional eye candy to check out, and Circle of Doom's art direction is consistently attractive, if not exactly stupendous. This isn't as obvious in some dungeons as in others--after all, ice caverns can only be so interesting. However, some levels are nice to look at, featuring colorful foliage, appropriately arid-looking deserts, and library corridors filled with bookcases and wardrobes. The game engine isn't a technical powerhouse, and you'll notice plenty of pop-in and a few frame rate jitters here and there. Yet slaughtering your enemies results in a nice spattering of blood and some nice, subtle visual effects. The sound design is also subtle, but to a fault. Many sound effects are oddly muted, while the soundtrack mixes orchestral swoons with metal grinding for varied but forgettable results.

In short spurts, Kingdom Under Fire: Circle of Doom can be reasonably amusing, though even the most resolute hack-and-slash enthusiasts will likely grow tired of the nebulous story and monotonous battles before reaching the final boss. Considering the number of character-specific quests and multiple story threads, the campaign is obviously meant to benefit from multiple play-throughs. The problem is that the actual act of playing it isn't very rewarding, so while there are some good ideas at work, these erudite ideas are overshadowed by a good number of design flaws that keep Circle of Doom from delivering any dependable sense of fun.

Metal Slug 3 (Xbox360)

For years now, SNK has been turning old ideas into new money by rereleasing its puckish Metal Slug action games on various home consoles, both in stand-alone and compilation titles. Metal Slug 3, arguably an apex for the series in terms of fresh ideas, narrative strength, and overall insanity, has now arrived on Xbox Live Arcade for 800 points ($10). That's a little steep for what is little more than a competent port of a seven-year-old arcade game, but it's still a manic, absurd experience that demands multiple plays.

While the original Metal Slug was a military-themed side-scrolling shooter with lots of cartoonish embellishments, the series became aggressively bizarre by the time Metal Slug 3 rolled around. Fatigue-wearing enemy soldiers barely register as cannon fodder as you face off against gigantic crabs, infectious zombie hordes, tentacled alien invaders and their slimy human clones, and more. You've got an array of high-impact weapons to fight them off with, as well as the various vehicles, or "slugs," that you'll happen upon, which range from tanks to weaponized ostriches. The game is rife with gigantic, wonderfully detailed boss fights, as well as plenty of sequences that stray from the standard side-scrolling action, including some great underwater and space sequences. This is just an incredibly inventive shooter, and the last few levels are some of the most purposefully outlandish in any game.

Having originally been an arcade game that depended on a regular infusion of quarters to operate, Metal Slug 3 can be incredibly--at times unfairly--difficult, though you can adjust the number of lives and continues you get, as well as the overall difficulty. It's also pretty short, and you can easily beat it in under an hour, though not without missing a huge number of alternate paths and weird little secrets. There are weapons, slugs, and entire groups of enemies that you probably won't see on a single play-through, making it a game that begs to be revisited.

Not much has been done to Metal Slug 3 in bringing it to Xbox Live Arcade. There has always been an obsessive amount of detail to the visuals in Metal Slug, and they still look good in HD, though old-timers will note that a filtering effect has taken away a lot of the pixelated edges, and that by default, enemy soldiers do not bleed red. There's local and online support for up to two players, and it works, though we noticed some pronounced frame rate issues in two-player games, and the online is highly susceptible to laggy conditions.

Ultimately, the things that might prevent you from enjoying Metal Slug 3, such as the number of times it's been released on other systems, its relative price point, and the lack of extras, are peripheral to the experience itself. If these things don't concern you, then you'll have a blast.